Nouveau Monde Graphite (NMG) has signed an agreement with American manufacturer General Motors (GM) for 18,000 tons of active anode material per year, with an investment of $150 million from the manufacturer and another investment of $175 million from the Japanese one Panasonic.
GM will provide $25 million for the second phase of the NMG venture (the Matawinie mine and the Bécancour battery materials plant). GM will then invest $125 million if the project goes well.
“Neighbors in Bécancour have become trading partners, GM and NMG share the same vision of a local and dynamic integrated supply chain, from ore to electric vehicles,” emphasized Éric Desaulniers, founder, president and CEO of NMG, in a statement on Thursday morning.
Éric Desaulniers, geologist and leader of these strategic projects, has been thinking big since his discovery of the Saint-Michel-des-Saints deposit in 2015. Photo Francis Halin
“We welcome GM as a shareholder who now shares in our strong North American business plan as well as our ESG commitments to responsible production and collaborative development with First Nations and local communities,” said Arne H. Frandsen, President of the NMG Board of Directors.
Aerial view of the Bécancour industrial park, in the foreground the site of NMG's second phase battery materials plant in Bécancour and in the background GM's Ultium CAM plant. Provided by NMG
Panasonic too
On Thursday, NMG announced alongside GM that Panasonic is also investing $25 million in phase two and will invest more than $150 million later.
In an interview with the Journal last June, CEO Éric Desaulniers mentioned more than $1.4 billion in projects, including the $923 million factory for 250 workers in Bécancour and the other worth $481 million for 150 workers in Saint-Michel-des-Saints.
“We have no choice but to build large factories. Companies don’t want to have eight different suppliers. Usually they want three. We have to be in that top three,” he concluded.
– In collaboration with Sylvain Larocque